The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)

There was and is a whole literature about unstructured and less-structured and alternatively-structured organisations; it even used to get a fair amount of coverage in mainstream news publications. But some time shortly after the year 2000 someone rang a bell, and now the only way to discuss the subject is to reshare "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" (which to be clear, is very good) every so often. (EDIT: And to re-emphasise, I'm not criticising yamrzou for sharing it!) Pasting one of my earlier comments on one of the earlier reposts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36292289

> This is really a good essay and surely deserves a high profile, but it's disappointing that it, and some bits of angst about Valve's internal situation, seem to be the only discussions of organisational structure that get widely shared these days. Back from about the '70s to the early '90s it seems that there was quite a lot of management-theory/theory-of-the-firm research into different organisational structures and how they affected innovation, ability to change and other desirable or undesirable characteristics of organisations. And it didn't just stay hidden in academia, as the results got a fair amount of coverage in newsmagazines and the like in the early '90s. (Which is how I heard about it: I'm no expert.) As you might expect, the findings on relatively "structureless" orgs seem to have been pretty compatible with Freeman's observations. But there was also research on many other unusual forms of structure and hierarchy, for example the "matrix management" which famously got implemented at Dow Chemical in the 1970s https://hbr.org/1978/05/problems-of-matrix-organizations .

> But for some reason interest and attention seems to have completely faded out, at least at the popular level, by about 2000 or so. So the Valve situation gets reported on as if it's some kind of unprecedented novelty, and not an example of a sort of situation whose outcomes had been hashed out pretty thoroughly a decade or more earlier.

I'd love to hear more about how an org structure (or lack thereof) killed a public company in 3 weeks.

> "structureless" groups which spontaneously organized around an opportunity and were initially effective [...] but succumbed to the dynamics

Even spontaneous groups must filter for Competence. This is fundamental.

From domain-specific skills to planning and managing the sustainability of the project, a spontaneous group must be more than superficial associates and barnacles.

For a humorously timeless example, see the revolutionary movement in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

https://montypython.fandom.com/wiki/The_People%27s_Front_of_...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WboggjN_G-4

That is a beige flag at worst. Every organisation has unwritten power structures that (often) exclude newcomers. Some organisations also have additional written power structures that (often) exclude newcomers.

>especially in a start up

It's an example that Zizek has often given. The startup boss is more insidious than the old school boss because he's "just your pal". The traditional boss you can rebel against, in the startup you can't because duh, you have no boss, so what are you complaining about? It's a way to disguise power.

Another thing is that it's also a way to dodge responsibility, as you see in tech. When a Japanese company fucks something up, you'll often see CEOs take salary cuts and sincerely apologize in front of the public. No need in startup land, nobody was responsible.

Indeed, flat or unstructured social organizations are going to lead to abuse if not coupled with some explicit philosophy that ensures that the group doesn't devolve into "might is right" or ingroup/outgroup thinking. Anarachists as in OP have one such philosophy and corresponding actionable processes to prevent abuse in unstructured groups.

So yes, the startups or orgs have to very explicitly lay down processes, otherwise the red flag is probably warranted.

Exactly. For those who need to understand what this can look like, I wrote up a detailed case here:

https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/the-accidental-d...

In Germany it just means it's a bad place to have a career in. Thankfully most HRs will happily advertise it in the job description making it easy to dodge.

There's a big difference between "flat"/shallow and "flat"/we don't have job titles.

Good organizations allow interactions without too many gates. Which is what the good kind of flat refers to.

Probably "Seeing Like a State", no?

Law is the ruling over the living by the dead.

“Thou shalt not make a machine in the image of a man’s mind.”

It mirrors in a lot of ways capitalism vs. communism. Or more precisely market based economies vs. command economies. The ultimate problem is that efficient distribution of resources depends on the unique conditions at thousands or millions of sites across the country. The people who are most well informed about what is needed are the people at those sites. The fundamental problem with command economies is transmitting that information up to the central source without overwhelming the system. Because it is way too much information to deal with they have to make simplifying assumptions, which lead to inefficiencies that compound over time.

The more decentralized your decision making the more efficient the system runs. However, this has drawbacks as it becomes hard or impossible to focus on big problems. On the flipside centralized systems are highly vulnerable to corruption. No system is perfect, and the most sensible systems use a combination of both.

Isn't who is decentralization vs. centralization in your argument seems to be more about comparing a group of states to a single one than anything else?

Seems a bit like an apple vs. fruit basket situation.

History is complicated. The reason the Chinese stopped building (and in fact scuttled) their fleets is collective trauma after the mass genocide carried out by the Mongols. Including the decapitation of the Chinese imperial elite and the erasure and sacking of several notable cities. The reason the Mongols were able to do what no steppe people had done before was because of the centralisation of the hordes under the leadership of Temujin, otherwise known as Genghis Khan.

> It is the task that basically structures the group.

Interesting idea. But the illustrations are lacking for now. I have seen events put up - and the thing is less that there was no structure (there are a core of people who know what they are doing, and the others who need their leadership) and more that (1) there is no time to haggle about the structure and (2) what you do notice is the people who are willing to put hard work on anything that needs it and the people who are there socially.

In the case of software projects, there is the thing of people putting in programming work on whatever they feel like - but meanwhile there is a structure of people defining the project, prioritizing bugs, etc. And there is very often a project owner or BDFL. We can rationalize it by saying that it's a technical structure or leadership but it's still there.

What I don't see much of is projects where being willing to show up and do the work is "enough". There are many project where people self assign themselves to this or that group - but that's not the same.

Yes, anarchists think that the right set of social processes can allow for organizations that don't have abusive hierarchies. But these processes themselves are very structured and take a lot of careful work.

This is so far from popular understanding of anarchism.

What you’re describing sounds a lot like syndicalism, which is an idea that many people interested in structure without hierarchy end up at! Including Noam Chomsky[0], who is perhaps better known here for his hierarchy (lol) of grammars.

[0] https://chomsky.info/19760725/

It seems that those ideas are mainly optimizing for making sure that the group of people in positions of authority will be diffuse, flexible, open, and temporary, or what she calls "democratic structuring" in the essay.

If one wants a default, well-tested structure, hierarchy seems to be a good candidate[1]. Another idea is to optimize for viability, meaning the ability to adapt to and survive changes in the environment, described by the Viable System Model[2].

I wonder if there are studies on the different ways of structuring and their goals and tradeoffs.

[1] Choose Boring Culture — https://charity.wtf/2023/05/01/choose-boring-technology-cult...

[2] Tools for Viable Organizing — https://vsru.org/articles/tools-for-viable-organizing.html

A traditional hierarchy is a tree, whereas a flat governance aims to be as close as possible to a connected graph. It's significantly easier to maintain a tree than a connected graph, especially with a sufficient group size. You're unlikely to find many people willing to invest so much effort into maintaining a flat organization, and even if you do, often times it's a better investment for those people to be actively making progress on that shared goal rather than governance.

IMO, a regular representative democracy is "good enough." It may be biased towards the elite, but it's still by far the most successful form of governance when it comes to creating large systemic change. The perceived ineffectiveness of it comes from people's unwillingness to put actual work, which applies to any other form of organization as well.

“Teams selecting leaders” or “randomly choosing the spokesperson” still gives rise to an explicit hierarchy, but in this case it’s not permanent and there’s a mechanism that prevents it from becoming permanent.

The idea that you can avoid hierarchy is, I think, confusing “social hierarchies with permanent places” - yes, bad, avoid that - with the _concept_ of hierarchy at all.